If you think by joining link farms and stuffing your site with as many links as possible will make your site popular in search engines, then you are highly mistaken. Your bad linking habits and strategies might get you even banned from the search engines.

Link farming or link stuffing is the phenomenon where sites start linking to other websites for the only reason of increasing their website’s link popularity without even bothering to check whether they are linking to relevant and related websites or not. Google has come to understand this dirty trick of some unethical webmasters and hates link farms. And anyone who indulges in link farming is branded spam by Google and may even get removed from Google’s index. The reason being that Google does not want irrelevant websites to be linked with others as it decreases the site's value to visitors and damages the image of the Web as provider of useful content to the visitors. Just imagine a clothes’ site linking to a music site does not make sense at all and costs precious time to the surfers.

The search engines are taking a very serious stand against all link farmers and Google’s spam policy states clearly to disregard link stuffing when building the index and computing static rank and to reduce the static rank of documents containing it.

So all I can do is to warn you and make you aware of the heavy price that you may have to pay if you displease the search engines with unethical link farming. Linking is good, but only with related and relevant websites, otherwise you are just calling trouble for your website.